A Political Companion to Walker Percy

11. Walker Percy, Alexis de Tocqueville, and the Stoic and Christian Foundations of American Thomism

11 Walker Percy, Alexis de Tocqueville, and the Stoic and Christian Foundations of American Thomism Peter Augustine Lawler According to John Courtney Murray in We Hold These Truths, the task of American Catholics is to supply a theory adequate to the greatness of our Founders’ practical accomplishment.1 The dominant theory of our nation is Lockeanism, the theory of a middle-class country. We Americans, so the thinking goes, are basically beings with “interests” and so beings with “rights.” We are free beings who work and demand that everyone work for him- or herself. We are middle class insofar as we’re free, like aristocrats, to work like slaves, and we’re enlightened enough to know we risk being suckered if we rely on the love or the trust of others instead of ourselves. So we pride ourselves in methodically resisting social instinct with selfish calculation. Each of us is compelled to sustain his or her being in freedom, and so we work hard to push back our dependence on nature—including our dependence on the instincts we’re given as social animals. That understanding of the “abstract” individual, everyone knows, doesn’t do justice to the experience of free persons who love and die. It doesn’t do justice to us as either relational or properly proud beings, as beings personally privileged by the longings and capacities that distinguish each human soul. For the American Catholic novelist/philosopher Walker Percy in Lost in the Cosmos (1983) and elsewhere, there are two indigenously American ways of criticizing or elevating the middle-class way of life.2 The first is the experience of the southern aristocrat—more specifically, the Stoic or philo- 238 Peter Augustine Lawler sophic consciousness of the best of those aristocrats. The other is Christianity . Percy was raised by perhaps the most remarkable and penetrating of those Stoics. From his “Uncle Will” (the poet William Alexander Percy), he learned to appreciate the place of the aristocratic virtues of generosity and magnanimity in the formation of the character of a properly proud human being. And he learned what’s true about the aristocratic criticism of the petty, calculating materialism of the American middle class. This criticism is of people without “class,” without a social, rooted orientation in habit and thought that would tell them who they are and what they’re supposed to do as ladies and gentlemen in the world—and as beings open to the genuine, moral responsibilities they’ve been given by their natures and by their place in the world. By turning to Christianity, Percy also learned the limits of such Stoicism : its denial of human equality, of justice, of rights, of what we owe in love to our fellow creatures. For Percy, American Thomism is what comes from an honest, Christian correction to what’s true about the Stoic criticism of middle-class life. That correction results in a very tentative, but very real, appreciation of the gains achieved by ordinary people—such as African Americans—under the influence of the middle-class conception of justice. Rights can be understood as not merely or even mainly the possession of self-interested individuals in competition with each other for scarce resources, the possession of producers and consumers. They can also be understood as what’s given to free, loving, truthful, lying, wondering, wandering, irreducibly mysterious, unique, and irreplaceable beings under God. They can be understood to be rooted in the full, natural truth about the ontological difference that privileges members of our species.3 Because the South is now both the most aristocratic and the most Christian part of our country, Percy makes it clear that American Thomism could originate nowhere else. But American Christianity hardly originated in the South, and the southern, Stoic aristocracy was not really Christian at all. And we can turn to our friendly French observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, for evidence that Percy’s Thomistic insight about America is hardly new. For Tocqueville, too, reconciling human greatness or the full truth about human individuality with the egalitarian justice that has its source in our Creator depends upon both Christian and aristocratic corrections to the middle-class American’s self-understanding about what human liberty is. Tocqueville, like Percy, occupied a kind a privileged position as a person The Stoic and Christian Foundations of American Thomism 239 with a genuinely aristocratic social and intellectual inheritance living in a democracy, and...